Month: May 2009

When we got the Sony 32v300A, I chose to connect it to our MacBook via a mini-DVI-to-VGA adapter, as I had read on some forums that people had VGA working well in 1080p mode for their bigger TVs.

Insurance replaced the 32V300A with a 32V4000, but I still could only chose 1360 x 768 @ 60 so was quite unhappy. Earlier in the week I had read on the NZ MythTV mailing list people were talking about setting up their TVs and ignoring the EDID data. By hand setting the resolutions to <60Hz timings you can get 1080p, as VGA/ VESA are only 60+ Hz timings.

With this extra information I went re-reading forums (via google) and found SwitchResX which lets you manually set you monitor timings. You only need to use SwitchResX Control Panel

Initially I was trying to get 1920 x 1080 @ 60 working. I got it mostly working, but the screen was horizontally squashed ~10% (underscan) and hard right justified. Lots of value tweaking and unpluging/pluging latter, I didn’t really have the problem solved.

I then re-read the EDID page and noticed the 1080p @ 50Hz settings, so tried those settings, and it was full screen, but overscanned.

I originally used the simplified GTF settings with 1920 x 1080 and vert 50Hz as input. But the bottom 5mm of the screen would flicker every five seconds. I then noticed the vertical total lines was 2 less than my other attempts that didn’t flicker, so after I increased the vert back porch from 35 to 37, it stopped flicking.

So here are the SwitchResX settings I use:

With settings I lose ~0.5% of the side of the screen. Thus with this 1920×1080 test picture I get this: